Dude, where's my flying car?

With recent attitudes towards the tech industry sometimes bordering on chilly, Americans are surprisingly optimistic about what technology has to offer them in the next 50 years.

According to a new report published by the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of those surveyed thought that technology would lead to peoples' lives being generally better, though what most people hope for is a little different than the expectations of yester-year:

When it comes to health technology, a majority of Americans (81 percent) believe they will be able to receive a transplant of an organ that has been custom grown in a lab. That's not to say that there is general approval of high-tech healthcare: 66 percent of those surveyed think society would be worse off if parents could alter the DNA of their prospective children to create custom-designed wunderkinder.

The idea of robots taking care of the elderly was also met with disaproval; 65 percent thought this would be a change for the worse. Inspiring even less confidence is the prospect of one day being able to pull off this stunt (only 39 percent of Americans believe that scientists will achieve teleportation in the near future):

Among current hot topics (i.e. drones and Google Glass), 63 percent thought we would be worse off if drones were given permission to fly through U.S. airspace, and 53 percent thought it would also be a negative development if people wore devices that constantly showed them information about the world around them.

In terms of that age-old expectation of flying cars, 19 percent of Americans said they would like to own a travel-related invention like said flying vehicle, but 50 percent said they would not ride in a self-driving car. Go figure.

In spite of skepticism surrounding certain aspects of technological advancement, the results of the study show that Americans' feelings are mixed-to-positive when it comes to how technology affects their lives -- Dystopian sci-fi aside, of course.

Tobin Low is the production assistant for the digital team at Marketplace. Working the overnight shift, he makes sure that all digital content for our daily morning broadcasts—Marketplace Morning Report and Marketplace Tech—is represented on web and social media platforms. In...